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Morten Tyldum, director of "The Imitation Game," discusses telling the untold story of Alan Turing and comments on the Sony hack. He speaks with Bloomberg's Pimm Fox on "Taking Stock." (Source: Bloomberg 1/15)

Tech Transitions, Video, and the Future | FCC.gov: "... Opening up program access will also stimulate the high-speed broadband buildout. In September, I detailed how limited today’s competition for high-speed fixed broadband in the United States is – about 75 percent of American homes have either zero or only one broadband network delivering speeds of 25 Mbps downstream/3 Mbps upstream or better. Those seeking to deploy new competitive broadband networks tell us that it’s hard to provide new high-speed Internet access without also being able to offer a competitive video package as well. An updated definition of MVPD would permit a new broadband competitor to offer customers the ability to reach a variety of OTT video packages without necessarily having to enter the video business itself.
We have passed from an era where it was necessary to build a purpose-specific pathway to deliver video. The innovation of Internet Protocol (IP) has freed video from these closed pathways and single-purpose devices. The proposal put forth today will update FCC rules to recognize this new reality and, as a result, expand competition and consumer choice."

Yahoo Labs' Algorithm Identifies Creativity in 6-Second Vine Videos | MIT Technology Review: ".... They then analysed each video with various algorithms. For example, they looked for compositional features such as the rule of thirds and shallow depth of field. They used an algorithm for analysing the content of video scenes that studies the contours and layout in an image. They also looked for any evidence that the videos were stop motion animations or designed to run on a seemingly endless loop by looking for similarities between the first and last frame. And they assessed the novelty of each video by comparing its properties against a randomly selected group of others.
They then looked for correlations between the features found by machine algorithms and the videos identified as creative by human volunteers. It turns out that the scene content is most strongly correlated with creativity, followed by compositional features and video novelty.
In a final step, they trained a machine learning algorithm to use these features to find creative videos in a dataset it had not seen before. That algorithm was able to correctly classify videos as either creative or noncreative 80 per cent of the time.
That’s an interesting result that opens the possibility of automatically filtering the Vine livestream for the most creative content. “This allows us to study audio-visual creativity at a fine-grained level, helping us to understand what, exactly, constitutes creativity in micro-videos,” say Redi and co.
And if it is possible for an algorithm to identify creativity accurately, why wouldn’t it be possible for a computer to generate creative content? In fact, spotting the difference between human-produced creativity and computer generated creativity may one day be an interesting Turing test-style exercise." (read more at link above)

Netflix CEO: Broadcast TV Will Be Dead By 2030 | | Betabeat: ",,,For Nielsen, this might look like modernization, but for those of us ready to enter 2015, it’s more like a move from the Mesozoic to the Paleozoic Era.
“It’s kind of like the horse, you know, the horse was good until we had the car,” Mr. Hastings said. “The age of broadcast TV will probably last until 2030.”..." (read more at link above)

Popular streaming channels:Netflix: The king of movie and TV show streaming. $7.99/mo.
YouTube: User-submitted videos and some original programming. Free.
Hulu Plus: TV shows days after they air and some movies. $7.99/mo.
Amazon Prime: A strong Netflix competitor with other Amazon benefits. $79/year.
Crackle: Movies and TV mostly from Sony's library. Free.
Vudu: Movie rental site owned by Walmart. Fees per movie